Jules Humbert-Droz

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Humbert-Droz in 1926

Jules-Frédéric Humbert-Droz (1891, in La Chaux-de-Fonds – 1971) was a Swiss pastor, journalist, Socialist and Communist. A founding member of the Communist Party of Switzerland, he held high Comintern office through the 1920s and also acted as Comintern emissary to several west European countries. He was involved in the Right Opposition in 1928.[1] He rejoined the Swiss Socialist Party in the 1940s, serving as secretary from 1946 to 1965.

Early life[]

Born in a working-class family of watchmakers with socialist beliefs, he joined the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland (Swiss Socialist Party) in 1911, at the age of twenty years. After studying Protestant theology in Neuchâtel, Paris and Berlin, he wrote a thesis about Socialism and christianism. He became a pastor in 1914, and started writing in the socialist daily newspaper La Sentinelle soon after.[2][3] He married Eugénie (Jenny) Perret in 1916, who would accompany him throughout his political life, becoming known as .[4]

Political life[]

A group of members of the International Bureau of Proletkult. Sitting (left to right): War Van Overstraeten, Pavel Lebedev-Polianskii (secretary).Anatoly Lunacharsky (chairman), Nicola Bombacci, Wilhelm Herzog, Standing Walther Bringolf, Jules Humbert-Droz

Humbert-Droz opposed the First World War and refused to serve in the Swiss Army, for which he was imprisoned.[5] He received another jail sentence for his participation the 1918 Swiss general strike.[3] He supported the Bolshevik revolution, and travelled with Walther Bringolf to Russia to represent the left wing of the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland.[6] There, the two of them joined the Provisional International Bureau of the Kultintern. In 1921 at the third International Congress of the Comintern, Jules Humbert-Droz was elected secretary of the Communist International, on the proposal of Lenin himself.[3] He became after 1920 an outstanding leader in the international communist movement, travelling all around the world to organize the national sections of the Comitern. He exerted some control over the French Communist party and called himself the eye of Moscow in Paris. He eventually became the first director of the Latin Secretariat of the Comintern.[7] He was an ally and friend of Nikolai Bukharin. After the , Bukharin was politically isolated and only few people in the Moscow Apparatus stayed loyal to him, including Humbert-Droz,[8] who was disgraced along with his ally.[7] Their friendship later ended. He stated in his 1971 Mémoires that it was because, in his last encounter with Bukharin in 1929, Bukharin had said that he had entered in contact with Zinoviev and Kamenev in order to remove Stalin from the leadership, and that they were planning to use individual terror (assassination) against him. Humbert-Droz disagreed with that because he thought that terror would destroy the Bolshevik leadership, and both knew well the crimes of which Stalin was capable.[9][10] He managed to re-enter the Executive Committee of the Communist International after self-criticizing and capitulating. In 1943, he was definitely expelled from the Swiss Communist Party.[5] Aware of his worth and experience, the Swiss Socialist Party invited him to return to his original party, where he was party secretary until 1959, and then secretary of the Neuchâtel cantonal section of the party until 1965. He retired to La Chaux-de-Fonds, yet remained politically active. He militated against the atomic armament of Switzerland, and contributed to various journals. Toward the end of his life, he undertook the writing of his memoirs, published between 1969 and 1973.[2]

Works[]

  • L’œil de Moscou à Paris, 1922-1924 (1964)
  • L'origine de l'Internationale communiste : de Zimmerwald à Moscou (1968)
  • Mémoires
1, Mon évolution du tolstoïsme au communisme, 1891-1921 (1969)
2, De Lénine à Staline, dix ans au service de l'Internationale communiste, 1921-1931 (1971)
3, Dix ans de lutte antifasciste : 1931-1941 (1972)
4, Le couronnement d'une vie de combat : 1941-1971 (1973)

References[]

  1. ^ "Nachts kamen Stalins Häscher" Der Spiegel (October 16, 1978), p. 100. Note: The HTML file is an OCR scan of a bad photocopy and is full of typos. There is a link at the URL to a PDF version, but it's not much easier to read. Retrieved November 15, 2011 (in German)
  2. ^ Jump up to: a b "Fonds Jules Humbert-Droz". biblio.chaux-de-fonds.ch. Bibliothèque de la ville de La Chaux-de-Fonds. Retrieved 2021-04-06.
  3. ^ Jump up to: a b c "Death of Jules Humbert-Droz, former secretary of the Communist International". Le Monde.fr (in French). 1971-10-19. Retrieved 2020-08-05.
  4. ^ "Jules Humbert-Droz". rts.ch (in French). 1971-02-16. Retrieved 2020-08-05.
  5. ^ Jump up to: a b Caballero, Manuel. "Latin America and the Comintern, 1919–1943 page 158". Cambridge Core. Retrieved 2020-08-05.
  6. ^ Drachkovitch, Milorad M.; Lazitch, Branko (1986). Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern. Stanford, California: Hoover Press. ISBN 978-0-8179-8403-8.
  7. ^ Jump up to: a b McDermott, Kevin; Agnew, Jeremy (1996). The Comintern. History of international Communism from Lenin to Stalin. London: MacMillan. pp. 85–86. ISBN 0-333-55284-9.
  8. ^ Cohen, Stephen F. (1980). Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-502697-9.
  9. ^ ""Une charogne", ou les destins croisés de Boukharine et Humbert-Droz". Le Temps (in French). 2017-07-06. ISSN 1423-3967. Retrieved 2020-08-05.
  10. ^ Humbert-Droz, Jules (1971). De Lénine à Staline : dix ans au service de l'Internationale communiste, 1921-1931. Mémoires de Jules Humbert-Droz. Neuchatel: La Baconnière.
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